Robert Fisk: Snapshots of life in Baghdad

Three bodies lie beside a Baghdad street on a blindingly hot day. The one on the right is dressed in a white shirt and bright green trousers, his hands tied behind his back. Two others on the left lie shoeless, both dressed in check shirts, dumped – how easily we use that word of Baghdad’s corpses – on a yard of dirt and bags of garbage. They, too, of course, are now garbage. The wall behind them, a grim barrier of dun-coloured brick, seals off this horror from two two-storey villas and a clutch of palm trees, the normal life of Baghdad just a wall away from the other “normal” life of Baghdad’s sectarian killings. No one knows whose bodies they are and the picture – taken from a car window – was snapped in fear by an unknown Iraqi.

It is a cell-phone picture, for now only the cell phones of the Iraqi people can record their tragedy. Another shows a young man’s body, taken from beside a car wing mirror, hands tied behind his back with his own shirt. Bombs explode across the Baghdad skyline, columns of smoke move into the air like sinister ghosts. Palm trees block off streets of fearful Iraqis. A car bomb blazes, the faint image of a US Humvee outlined against the trees. There are broken bridges, wounded friends, blood-soaked cloth.

But there are also families; even a Muslim family celebrating Christmas, all dressed in Santa Claus hats, and a graduation party where the girls wear Bedouin black dresses with gold-fringed scarves and the boys wear Arab headdress and white abayas – something quite foreign to the middle classes of what was once one of the most literate and educated cities of the Middle East.

But it is the cell phone that has captured this terrible, fearful, brave face of Baghdad. Western photographers can no longer roam the streets of the Iraqi capital – and few other cities in Iraq – and in south-west Afghanistan, the same phenomenon has occurred.

We Westerners need the locals to photograph their tragedy and their ragged, often fuzzy, poorly framed pictures contain their own finely calibrated and terrible beauty. The fear of the cell-phone snapper is contained in almost every frame. Most of the Iraqis are refugees-to-be, for the Dutch photographer Geert van Kesteren, who collected 388 pages of photographs for his book Baghdad Calling, wanted to catalogue the tragedy of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who are the largely ignored victims of our demented 2003 invasion and occupation.

Van Kesteren, an unassuming but imaginative journalist whom I met recently in Holland, noticed that refugees used their cell phones as family albums and decided, in the words of Brigitte Lardinois, formerly director of Magnum Photos in London, “to let the pictures of ordinary, non-professional photographers tell the story this time”. Iraqi refugees in Jordan asked friends to send more pictures from Baghdad.

Some were rejected because of their suspect provenance – alas, we therefore do not see the picture of an American soldier, apparently firing a rifle from atop a donkey, but which might have been digitally edited – but others cannot be anything but the truth. The smiling families, hiding in their homes as the killers roam the darkness outside, the young men relaxing in the safety of Kurdistan, swimming in the lakes, revelling in the nightlife, the plump nephew of one of the anonymous cell-phone photographers sitting on a bright red sports car, have to be real.

It must have been hard for Van Kesteren, a news photographer in his own right, to have submerged his own work for this brilliant amateur collection. A few of Van Kesteren’s own professional pictures appear in Baghdad Calling but they are taken in the safety of Syria, Jordan or Turkey and – save for a group photograph of courageous Iraqis captured after illegally crossing the Turkish border but still determined to escape from their country again – they lack the power and immediacy of the Iraqi snapshots.

The refugee statistics are so appalling that they have become almost mundane. Four million of Iraq’s 23 million people have fled their homes – until recently, at the rate of 60,000 a month – allegedly more than 1.2 million to Syria (a figure now challenged by at least one prominent NGO), 500,000 to Jordan, 200,000 to the Gulf, 70,000 to Egypt, 57,000 to Iran, up to 40,000 to Lebanon, 10,000 to Turkey. Sweden has accepted 9,000, Germany fewer – where an outrageous political debate has suggested that Christian refugees should have preference over Muslim Iraqis. With its usual magnanimity – especially for a country that set off this hell-disaster by its illegal invasion – George Bush’s America has, of course, accepted slightly more than 500.

This collection of pictures is therefore an indictment of us, as well as of the courage of Iraqis. The madness is summed up in an email message sent to Van Kesteren by a Baghdad Iraqi. “This summer,” he wrote, “a workman wanted to quench his thirst by putting ice in his tea. A car pulled up, the driver stepped out and began to beat and kick the man, cursing him as an unbeliever. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Did the Prophet Mohamed put ice in his water?’

The man being attacked was furious and asked his assailant: ‘Do you think the Prophet Mohamed drove a car?'”

* The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/robert-fisk-snapshots-of-life-in-baghdad-849226.html

Joanna Jolly: Migrants tell of township tensions

Ahmed Dakane is a 31-year old Somali refugee. For the past four years he’s been living in the South African township of Zweletemba, on the outskirts of the town of Worcester in the wine-growing hills outside Cape Town.
Among the sprawling mess of tin huts and makeshift shelters he points out a pile of rubble that until recently was his shop and his livelihood.
Two months ago a mob of local South African youths surrounded and destroyed it, forcing Ahmed to flee for his life.
“All the community from this place, all South Africans, almost 1,000 people came to me,” he says, describing the night of violence.
“I called the police. When they came they said we can save your life but we can’t save your shop. So they took me and put me in the police station. I lost everything, even my clothes.”
Hunted and attacked
Locals living in Zweletemba say the attack was provoked by another Somali shopkeeper who shot dead a robber.

But when the angry mob looked for revenge, they didn’t just target one shopkeeper, but every foreigner living in the township.
Zimbabwean car mechanic, Norman Kajeni, was also hunted down and attacked.
“They come here, they robbed me, they took my equipment, they broke the car, they broke the house. They hit me. I had sixteen stitches in the head,” he says.
“They don’t like foreigners here. For the reasons we don’t know, because we have just come here to work to make a living.”

The attack in Zweletemba is not an isolated event.
Since the end of apartheid 14 years ago, Africans from all over the continent – both legal and illegal – have migrated to South Africa, attracted by its booming economy and apparent wealth.
There are no official figures of how many foreigners are in South Africa, but the South African Forced Migration Studies Programme estimates that between one and three million African migrants now live in the country, many of them from Zimbabwe.
The past few months have seen a marked increase in attacks by the local South African community on black migrants, causing some to describe the situation as the “new apartheid”.
‘New apartheid’
In Zweletemba, community workers like Sylvanus Dixon – himself from Sierra Leone – say high unemployment, poor infrastructure and few prospects for South Africa’s majority black population leads to jealousy of migrants.

“The problem is that people don’t want to accept the refugees or the foreigners. They don’t know who to blame for what has happened in South Africa – the apartheid, the struggling.
“They see all this influx of foreigners, especially the black foreigners, they think what is going on?” he says.
“They see foreigners with businesses and they don’t know how they got their money. They think maybe he got money from the government, they don’t know.
“That’s where the jealousy is coming from. That’s when the fear becomes xenophobia.”
Sylvanus Dixon believes that many South Africans also blame foreigners for the high levels of crime in the township.
‘We don’t want foreigners’
Not all South Africans are hostile to incomers. Ahmed Dakane is now rebuilding his shop with the help of a group of locals who are keen to see him re-start his business.
But there is also anger in the community. Watching Ahmed fix corrugated iron to the sides of his new shed is a teenage South African boy.
“We don’t need the foreigners here,” he says.
“They have a lot of businesses here, but they don’t do anything for Zweletemba They have a lot of shops but they don’t employ Zweletemba youth.”
His comments are echoed by a middle-aged South African woman who says foreigners charge too much for basic goods and don’t pay their workers enough.
“They must go, we don’t want the foreigners here. We don’t have jobs. The foreigners come here for our jobs.”
In the past few weeks community workers like Sylvanus Dixon have organised meetings between local and migrants in Zweletemba to ease tensions.
But Ahmed and the other foreigners who live here, believe that until the major issues of poverty and unemployment are solved, it’s only a matter of time before they become victims again.

* BBC
* http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7402443.stm

James Watson: To question genetic intelligence is not racism

Science is no stranger to controversy. The pursuit of discovery, of knowledge, is often uncomfortable and disconcerting. I have never been one to shy away from stating what I believe to be the truth, however difficult it might prove to be. This has, at times, got me in hot water.

Rarely more so than right now, where I find myself at the centre of a storm of criticism. I can understand much of this reaction. For if I said what I was quoted as saying, then I can only admit that I am bewildered by it. To those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.

I have always fiercely defended the position that we should base our view of the world on the state of our knowledge, on fact, and not on what we would like it to be. This is why genetics is so important. For it will lead us to answers to many of the big and difficult questions that have troubled people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

But those answers may not be easy, for, as I know all too well, genetics can be cruel. My own son may be one of its victims. Warm and perceptive at the age of 37, Rufus cannot lead an independent life because of schizophrenia, lacking the ability to engage in day-to-day activities. For all too long, my wife Ruth and I hoped that what Rufus needed was an appropriate challenge on which to focus. But as he passed into adolescence, I feared the origin of his diminished life lay in his genes. It was this realisation that led me to help to bring the human genome project into existence.

In doing so, I knew that many new moral dilemmas would arise as a consequence and would early on establish the ethical, legal and societal components of the genome project. Since 1978, when a pail of water was dumped over my Harvard friend E O Wilson for saying that genes influence human behaviour, the assault against human behavioural genetics by wishful thinking has remained vigorous.

But irrationality must soon recede. It will soon be possible to read individual genetic messages at costs which will not bankrupt our health systems. In so doing, I hope we see whether changes in DNA sequence, not environmental influences, result in behaviour differences. Finally, we should be able to establish the relative importance of nature as opposed to nurture.

One in three people looking for a job in temporary employment bureaux in Los Angeles is a psychopath or a sociopath. Is this a consequence of their environment or their genetic components? DNA sequencing should give us the answer. The thought that some people are innately wicked disturbs me. But science is not here to make us feel good. It is to answer questions in the service of knowledge and greater understanding.

In finding out the extent to which genes influence moral behaviour, we shall also be able to understand how genes influence intellectual capacities. Right now, at my institute in the US we are working on gene-caused failures in brain development that frequently lead to autism and schizophrenia. We may also find that differences in these respective brain development genes also lead to differences in our abilities to carry out different mental tasks.

In some cases, how these genes function may help us to understand variations in IQ, or why some people excel at poetry but are terrible at mathematics. All too often people with high mathematical abilities have autistic traits. The same gene that gives some people such great mathematical abilities may also lead to autistic behaviour. This is why, in studying autism and schizophrenia, we believe that we shall come very close to a better understanding of intelligence and, therefore, of the differences in intelligence.

We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things. The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science.

To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers. It is very likely that at least some 10 to 15 years will pass before we get an adequate understanding for the relative importance of nature versus nurture in the achievement of important human objectives. Until then, we as scientists, wherever we wish to place ourselves in this great debate, should take care in claiming what are unarguable truths without the support of evidence.

* The writer, a Nobel prizewinner for his part in unraveling DNA, is chairman of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the United States
* © The Independent
* http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article3075642.ece